Tuesday, October 13, 2009

As a feral tank - and really, as any tank would tell you if they were honest, Argent Defender is ridiculous. It's not just overpowered, it's superpowered. It's a relic from an older age when power just flowed like candy, and really shouldn't exist in this world of more realistic, 5% bonuses and gritty power benefits.

I mean, the guy can fly through space on a surf board. He is the herald of Galactus, who can eat whole worlds and has a weapon that erases you from existence. He uses the power cosmic - and that's like using cheat codes, basically. He's taken on the entire Fantastic Four and whooped them; the only reason they won is that he felt some pity and remorse for his planet.

So totally nerf Argent Defender. He's stupid.

However, if you're talking about the paladin talent Ardent Defender, it's just about right and puts paladins on a similar but not as good level of EH as a druid. The proc is reasonable and is on the same level of power as many other ohshit buttons, with the proviso that it's much better in some cases (ohai, Algalon) and not nearly as good in others.

Sorry for that. Was feeling a bit silly this morning and was annoyed at yet another stupid thread about Argent Defender, and that silly misspelling. Argent means 'silver'. Argent Crusade - Silver Crusade, kinda like that Silver Hand thing. That big burst on the tabard? It's in silver, ya know. Ardent means impassioned or hot, like...zealousness. Ya know, like what paladins are?

9 comments:

The difference is that it's an automatic "Oh Shit" button - we don't have to do anything about it. Fall below 35% HP? No problem - auto damage reduction. Oops! You died - almost. Here's AD to pop you back up.

Oh - and it's amazingly OP against Algalon - you can use it to easily eat a 2nd Big Bang if you have to.

I like it cause if I see it come up on our pally tank I can yell at our healers because they have already failed at least once. (and for some reason I like yelling at the healers).

But I do agree with people that that skill itself is TOTALLY OP, but remember how pallys were before 3.2.2 (I don't get it man how do you die to kologarn)? They were the weakest of the 4 tank classes by far. If you check the patch notes for 3.2.2 the only buff they really got to mitigation was Ardent Defender.

I didnt really know where to post this but i have been following your blog for a while and waiting for you to take a general look at the tier set bonuses for feral but i got impatient and so i decided to take a look at them myself so i started a blog and was wondering if you would take a look at it to see if it looks good.

Can we see some math/support for pallies and bears having similar EH values? In my experience our protadin is definitely more resilient then either myself (who's been passing tank gear) or our warrior (who hasn't). It may just be a product of him being about half a tier of gear ahead of me or not, given the results of your prior post on ridiculous bear health values. At the moment he runs about 55k health raid buffed, which is similar to what I have when using Glyph/Heart.

Mostly I'm just curious if my napkin math about AD is correct or not. The proc is perfect in terms of flavor, I think, and something pallies desperately needed. It's just interesting that after they took the no-leapfrog clause out of WotN for DKs they turned around and gave it to Pallies.

Yeah speaking of set bonus's (which I think Kalon did adress several pages down) I have been finding it more and more conflicting lately, first I just want to say it seems like the most control bears have over whether we live or die in tanking is our CD uses/timing. So ideally 12 secs off barkskin will help that. BUT as a lot of us have found its hard to replace chest and legs with tier gear as tier gear is not bis in reg or hard modes, and as a result i sit with 3 piece t9.25 and the 4th piece I put off blowing dkp on. (also thanks blizz for making us wait until after we kill anub hard to get 258 tier).

So I'll think about this more, but the key question is: On what TOC25HM fights does the reduced barkskin cd make using an additional (chest or legs) tier piece worthwhile? And what fights do I go with BIS and forget about 4 piece?

Perhaps I'm making too much of it as its just a slight difference, but as 258 non-set chest and legs drop long before 258 set pieces in progression(my guild has yet to down anub25 hard mode), it makes the difference between 4-piece 245 and BIS 258 a lot greater.

The class is designed for players who don't want to keybind more than five abilities in any spec!

In all seriousness, I could understand that the devs didn't want to give out another Survival Instincts/Last Stand to another tanking class. But AD being passive and as game-changing as it is just makes no sense.

Sigh. Not even one chuckle, and a bunch of people thinking I was serious.

Adgamorix - I don't really think that whether or not you must actively manage the cooldown is that important, honestly. I don't like that aspect, but it certainly doesn't make it any more OP than it was (if it was); basically, it gives paladins a perfectly played CD, but you must assume that all other classes also play their CDs perfectly. And as I pointed out, while it's awesome for Algalon it's horrible in other situations that a Last Stand/SI wouldn't be.

dtc, I don't think it's that bad. It's a CD within paladin flavor that is equivalent to another CD, that works amazingly well against one giant attack and fairly poorly against a flurry of them.

Jey, sorry I haven't gotten back to you - I'll check out your blog today.

Thessaly, I can try and work on that. I do think that one way or another, if you're at equivalent levels of health he's certainly going to have more EH. Essentially you can just give paladins another 20% boost to their 35% HP that's affected by EH as it will never get leapfrogged, and that's much better than the armor that druids have.

My experience is that on the hardest tank fight (Gormok) Paladins really excel because AD automatically works and you're often very close to that threshold. It was quite the wakeup call to switch from our paladin tank to me, for instance; clearly AD had been saving the pally a lot more than we had thought.

dtc the second: the biggest advantage the T9 4p has is on Anub'arak, where you will have it up for more freezing slashes. It's somewhat useful for Gormok, but not so much that it matters hugely. But for Anub'arak it's very well-suited, and many progression guilds have used bears for this reason alone.

I'm sure someone has worked out the value relative to armor, but our warrior and myself had a similar reaction to yours on Gormok, as we felt like we were playing chicken with a train on the 3rd and 4th Impales, whereas the pally was able to take a 5th and sometimes 6th during wipes.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.